The approval chain

The approval chain is your project's org chart for signing off work. It decides whose inbox a timesheet lands in, and in what order.

How it works

You — the producer — are always at the top and can't be removed. Below you, add approvers and arrange them into a tree, where each person reports to the one above. When a crew member submits a timesheet, it climbs the chain one level at a time: each approver in the path signs off before it moves up, until it reaches you and is final.

Assigning departments

Every department on the project is a small draggable chip. Drag each one onto the approver who should review that department's timesheets. The visual tree is the source of truth: a department belongs to the deepest approver who explicitly holds it, and anything you don't assign falls through to you, the producer.

An approver can also be scoped to specific departments — for example, an approver with timesheet rights but scoped to Camera only reviews camera hours.

Duties & rights

Tap an approver to set their duties & rights, which decide what they must and may do:

• Timesheet — approve hours.
• Finance — see and approve money: rates, pay and invoices.
• Team forming — add and recommend crew in their departments.
• Accounting — settle invoices (mark them processed) and export them to the production's bookkeeping. It does not approve invoices — that stays with Finance, so paying and approving can be kept in different hands.

Timesheet and Finance are approval duties: submitted items route through this person and wait in their Inbox. Team forming, Planning and Accounting are additional rights — they only unlock actions; nothing ever waits on them.

Rights and department scope are independent: someone can approve hours for one department without seeing anyone's pay.

Planning rights

The Planning right lets an approver build scenarios for the departments they're scoped to, then send them to you for approval — without touching the live plan themselves. They draft schedule and team changes in a scenario; you review and promote it. Like Team forming, Planning is an additional right: it unlocks actions but nothing routes to their Inbox — their finished scenarios route to yours.

Whole-team roles: the production office

Most approvers own one or more departments and sit inside the tree. Some roles, though, work across the whole production — a bookkeeper who settles everyone's invoices, a coordinator who forms crew for every department, a planner. Seat these in the Production office band, directly under you.

Tap Add whole-team role, pick the person and choose their rights. They report straight to you: the last link before the producer, but never the final word — you always sign off above them. Because their scope is the entire crew, they carry additional rights only (accounting, team forming, planning), not the per-department approval duties, which route department by department.

The filter pills

The pills at the top of the chart (clock / money / people) filter the tree to show only approvers with that right. While a filter is on, hidden approvers' reports move up so the chart stays connected, and dragging is disabled. Turn the filters off to edit the chain again.